Hey everyone You may remember me from posting on the beginner board somewhat regularly (if only for a short time) a little while back... Anyway, thanks to everyone's help, I found the direction and motivation to teach myself game design and programming, improved my abilities, practiced a lot, and now I've partnered up with a friend and a colleague to start a pretty ambitious game development project. It started as my attempt at my first really "big" game project... Something I would have to devote weeks or months of planning, and then who knows how long to create. I wanted to take a big idea I had and just MAKE IT HAPPEN.

I really felt I was ready. As I talked with my friends, they really enjoyed the idea, and my composer friend offered to work on the music for the game. Whenever I would mention the project (even something dumb like making my facebook status "spent 4 hours getting one bug out today :,c") I would find people begging me to finish so they could play the game. I've found a lot of support for the project and it's given me a lot of motivation. The project has grown and grown and it's getting so big I now have three dedicated members of the development team, and we're starting a humble kickstarter soon (it's in the review queue right now) in hopes of getting some funds to make this game everything we'd like it to be.

Since this was really the place where I got the original confidence to teach myself to code, develop, and design, I thought I'd come back and share a "gamedev.net bigger board success story" or something, hahaha I started out programming it "from scratch" in C++ but later realized that everything in the design could be done all the same in a 2D engine and made my prototype in GameMaker:Studio, which is pretty new and pretty great. Since I'm still a bit of a novice programmer (this is my first 'big' game after all), it has really helped me organize my game and keep my focus on the design without having to worry about so many other issues.

Anyway, now that you know the backstory, let me introduce to you the game project, The Legend of Red Dragon Ranch:

It's a monster-training game that focuses on user play-style and care of the monster. It originally was just a curious idea in my head (I even asked some questions about pet games here when it was still a baby idea and I wasn't actually planning on creating it any time soon). Visit the link above to learn more. The "devblog" is not all that fleshed-out, but definitely tells a lot about the game if you read through the few posts that do exist.